Mariana Castillo DeBall, These Ruins You See
Hardcover, 272 pp. + insert, offset 4/1, 155 x 225 mm
English and Spanish
Edition of 2000
ISBN 978-1-933128-46-7
Published by Sternberg Press
$30.00 · out of stock
An amazing book containing a collection of found objects and exhumed artifacts, contemporary and historical illustrations along with thought provoking essays, all looking at the changing ways Mexico has told the story of its past. The various layers of Mexico’s archaeology are forever present, giving rise to continual interpretations, reconstructions, demolitions, and annexations. This volume, based on a number of exhibitions, publications and lectures, brings together the history of collections and exhibitions of pre-Columbian objects, as well as the manufacture of replicas, the shadowy world of forgers and the relocation of key objects, among related themes. This eclectic grouping of ideas brings into sharp relief the ideological baggage and the range of museographic practices that always and inevitably frame our perception of these objects and artifacts.
Hannes Gloor, Manuel Raeder, Mariana Castillo Deball, RAM, Sternberg Press
Aleksandra Mir, Corporate Mentality
Softcover, 256 pp., offset 4/1, 230 x 300 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN 0-9711193-1-7
Published by Sternberg Press
$40.00 ·
Calling for a reassessment of the function of art in late capitalist society,
Corporate Mentality focuses on the complex and ambiguous ways artistic production inhabits corporate processes, abandoning the autonomy of the artwork in order to elaborate resistant approaches to a world increasingly determined by commercial strategies and market concerns.
Based on an archive (1995–2001) maintained by Aleksandra Mir, it presents a diverse spectrum of artists who take on business as site, as material, and as subject of their work. As Will Bradley writes in frieze, “The book focuses on … an essential area of interest as artists wake up to the reality of the Clinton-era fantasy of ethical corporatism. The plan came out of Mir and Kelsey’s realization that the publicity industry wasn’t stealing artists’ ideas, but simply employing artists, like Mir herself, who needed a day job. ‘Radical’ aesthetics that had taken at least six months to travel (we’re in New York here) from downtown to uptown were now transferred almost instantaneously, causing artists to reassess their methods.”
Absolute Vodka, Anthony Davies, Art, Atelier van Lieshout, Bennett Simpson, Bernadette Corporation, Carey Young, Claude Closky, Daniel Pflumm, Dejanov & Heger, Gareth James, John Kelsey, Lars Bang Larsen, Laura K. Jones, Liam Gillick, Matthieu Laurette, Piotr Uklanski, Purple Institute, RAM, Simon Ford, Sternberg Press, Superflex, Will Bradley
Karel Martens: Counterprint
Softcover, 32 pp., offset 4/4, 210 x 297 mm
Edition of 4000
ISBN 978-0-907259-25-1
Published by Hyphen Press
$35.00 ·
Throughout his career as a designer, Karel Martens has made artistic (uncommissioned) work. In his early days he used sheets of paper, cut to make reliefs. Then he began to make prints from Meccano, metal plates and washers, and other found objects. These prints were made in very small numbers, or were perhaps one-offs. They were studies in form and colour, done as experiments or intended as gifts to friends. The work was very much in the Dutch tradition of experimental printing (the artist H.N.Werkman is the great exemplar here). But Martens kept this work largely apart from his graphic design work. He has occasionally shown it in exhibitions, and some pieces were published in the book
Karel Martens: printed matter / drukwerk.
This is the first publication devoted to Martens’s prints. It is made in association with the printer Lecturis, in Eindhoven, and is produced to the highest quality. Bound in Chinese/Japanese fashion, like the first Martens book, it has a strong quality as an object. The main text in the book is an essay by the English designer Paul Elliman: ‘The world as a printing surface’. Dutch critic and teacher Carel Kuitenbrouwer provides a short introduction. The book is designed by Hans Gremmen, under the supervision of Karel Martens, at the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem.
Carel Kuitenbrouwer, Graphics, Hans Gremmen, Hyphen Press, Karel Martens, PAP, Paul Elliman, Typography, Werkplaats Typografie
Keith Bormuth, The Occasion of Fracture
Softcover, 28 pp., offset 1/1, 160 x 240 mm
Edition of 500
Published by Keith Bormuth
$10.00 ·
Keith Bormuth’s The Occasion of Fracture traces the notion that media fulfills itself in a phatic relationship to knowledge. Following a ghost image of Reyner Banham’s seminal text on Los Angeles, Bormuth melds the on-screen laughter of the 1940s Hollywood star Irene Dunne with the show Gossip Girl, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s posthumously published The Crack Up, and the cameo appearance by Georges Bataille as a priest in Jean Renoir’s film Partie de Campagne. Composed in 11 themes, the text seeks to fracture the semblance images have as things.
Albert Reis, Art, Blair Waldorf, Chuck Bass, Criticism, Dawn Aragon, Distribution, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Georges Bataille, Guy Debord, Irene Dunne, Jean Renoir, Karl Kraus, Keith Bormuth, Manhab Renyer, Reyner Banham, Serena van der Woodson, Theory
Hans-Peter Feldmann, Album
Hardcover, 308 pp., offset 4/4, 240 x 305 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN 9783865602602
Published by Walther König
$95.00 · out of stock
Pin-up girls, weight-lifting studies, newspaper clippings, baby pictures…Hans-Peter Feldmann tells stories with pictures. Accordingly, apart from the title page, this photo album contains no text. Even the frontispiece is a photograph of boxes from Feldmann’s picture archive — amassed over many years and comprising images from magazines, advertising supplements, photography books, postcards and collectibles. Travel photos, family snapshots and pictures of friends play their part as well. In recent years, Feldmann has become increasingly noted for his commentary on the way we archive photos, sending up the everyday from a very personal perspective. He seeks out the trivial incidents, the unnoticed moments, and keeps them close at hand. According to Feldmann, “Works of art should not be expensive, nor unique, but cheap and fast to produce. A painting immediately acquires a sort of importance, whereas a photo is much more arbitrary, as it’s a lot easier to throw away.”
Art, DAP, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Walther König
Christoph Büchel and Giovanni Carmine, PSYOP: Post-9/11 Leaflets
Softcover, 144 pp., offset 4/4, 165 x 235 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN 9783905701128
Published by JRP|Ringier
$22.00 ·
In the spirit of Taliban, this artist’s book on military “psychological operations” collects over 120 propaganda leaflets that have been dropped by the U.S. Army on Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other similar material. It offers unique insight into the intense and varied strategies in play in a chaotic Middle East.
Art, Christoph Büchel, DAP, Giovanni Carmine, Graphics, JRP|Ringier
Sturtevant, Push and Shove
Softcover, 120 pp., offset 4/4, 8.5 x 11 inches
Edition of 2000
ISBN 9788881585441
Published by Charta
$40.00 ·
An art-world legend records that somebody once asked Andy Warhol about his process, to which he replied, “I don’t know. Ask Elaine.” True or not, one thing is sure — Elaine Sturtevant likes to fake it. Working alongside her contemporaries since the mid-1960s, the artist is best known today for her reproductions of then-radical works by Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Claus Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Joseph Beuys, and others. Mainly absent from the art scene in the 1970s, Sturtevant reemerged in the 1980s, and has adhered to her rigorous conceptual strategy ever since, even re-creating Paul McCarthy’s fabulously grotesque video performance, “The Painter” in 2002. Exploring notions of originality, replication and simulacra, Sturtevant’s work has been a meditation on as much as a provocation of such concepts, and has continued to garner attention in her 40 years of practice in the fields of art history and philosophy. Included here are images of her re-installation of Marcel Duchamp’s 1,200 coal bags at New York’s Perry Rubinstein Gallery and stills from her 1967 film, Nude Descending a Staircase. Also represented is the artist’s seven-channel video installation from 2003, The Dark Threat of Absence/Fragmented and Sliced.
Art, Charta, DAP, Elaine Sturtevant, Perry Rubenstein Gallery, Purtill Family Business
Lutz Bacher, SMOKE (gets in your eyes)
Softcover, 216 pp., offset 1/1, 9 x 12 inches
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-0-9815449-0-8
Published by Regency Arts Press
$35.00 ·
SMOKE (gets in your eyes) is the first major artist’s book by the influential yet elusive conceptual artist Lutz Bacher.
SMOKE (gets in your eyes) was assembled by Ms. Bacher as a companion to the two exhibitions SPILL (Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, September 12, 2008 — January 4, 2009) and MY SECRET LIFE (P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, Winter 2009).
Amanda Parmer, Art, Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, Distribution, Lutz Bacher, MoMa, PS1, Regency Arts Press
Eva Lundsager, Ascendosphere
Softcover, 20 pp., offset 4/4, 220 x 305 mm
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-0-9815449-6-0
Published by Regency Arts Press
$15.00 ·
Ascendosphere features a series of 19 gouache works on paper by painter Eva Lundsager. Published on the occasion of her solo exhibition at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery.
Art, Distribution, Eva Lundsager, Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, Jean Paul Torno, Regency Arts Press
Erik Hanson, A Year of Playlists
Softcover, 14 pp., offset 2/1, 275 x 355 mm
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-0-9749037-3-6
Published by Regency Arts Press
$15.00 ·
Erik Hanson’s A Year of Playlists, twelve monthly drawings from 2007 chronicling Mr. Hanson’s playlists with songs rendered as matchbooks, is a scrappy collection of strays, throwaways and disposables, tracking love found, lost, found, lost, found…
Andrea Rojas, Art, Distribution, Erik Hanson, Regency Arts Press
Bernadette Corporation, Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte
Softcover, 150 pp., offset 4/1, 165 x 240 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN: 978-1-933128-17-7
Published by Sternberg Press
$25.00 · out of stock
Formed in 1994, the Bernadette Corporation is a creative collective based in New York and Europe and organized around revolving memberships and associations. Its artistic output has ranged from fashion to film and literature, training videos, photography, etc., consistently insisting on the idea that the re-imagined format should inform the subject and give shape to its output. Whereas the first book released by BC was reportedly written by 150 people, in an “exquisite corpse” format, the second “novel,” entitled Be Corpse, is described as “a screenplay that cannot be a film” or “a film that can only be on paper.” A drama in three acts, the text seeks to make the gap between our primordial and contemporary selves collapse on itself, revealing an instinctless body and the brain manifest as the over-stimulated observer. Above all, Be Corpse should be received as the continuation of BC’s indirect, fiercely independent critique of our late capitalist/globalized world.
Art, Bernadette Corporation, Book Works, Fashion, Film, RAM, Sternberg Press
Olivia Plender, A Stellar Key to the Summerland
Softcover, 112 pp., offset 1/1, 140 x 180 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN: 978-1-870699-86-0
Published by Book Works
$30.00 ·
British artist Olivia Plender’s work is based in historical research, finding idiosyncratic and little-known events, “peculiar pockets of forgotten history that sit awkwardly with the way we live now,” as one observer comments. Her new graphic novel takes us to another of those pockets, the Modern Spiritualist Movement, which began in 1848, a heady mixture of non-conformist religion, politics and popular entertainment presented as a scientific response to the newly industrialized world. The movement’s working-class base linked it to political campaigns, particularly the anti-slavery movement and the campaign for women’s suffrage. By acting as mediums, women found a unique opportunity to give political speeches — in the guise of channeling a spirit — without transgressing social boundaries. Plender, who was a participant in the 2006 Tate Triennial, mimics the techniques of 19th-century pamphlets and combines spiritualist ephemera with interviews in this absorbing work. Part of Book Works Singular Sociology Series.
Art, Book Works, Olivia Plender, RAM
Frances Stark, A Torment of Follies
Softcover, 96 pp., offset 4/1, 200 x 310 mm
Edition of 5000
ISBN 9783865604644
Published by Walther König
$40.00 ·
This exhibition catalogue disguised as an artist’s book presents recent work by the Los Angeles artist, writer and all-around favorite, Frances Stark. Taking as her starting point the novel Ferdydurke by the esteemed Polish author Witold Gombrowicz, Stark explores two key aspects of the novel, according to Andras Palffy, President of the esteemed Viennese exhibition space, Secession — “the individual’s right to uncertainty or immaturity and all possible forms of masquerade” and “deception towards one’s environment.” Whereas Gombrowicz took on the sinister political developments of 1930s Poland, Stark aptly and humorously attacks the hierarchies, systems and pigeon holes of the contemporary commercial art world. Of special note are the very effective optical illusions embedded in the images reproduced here.
Andras Palffy, Art, DAP, Frances Stark, Martin Prinzhorn, Walther König, Witold Gombrowicz
